Spain - Asunta Fong Yang, 12, Killed by Wealthy Adoptive Parents

One day in late June 2001, Rosario Porto, a petite, dark-haired lawyer from Santiago de Compostela, northern Spain, sat nervously on a flight to China beside her husband Alfonso Basterra, a quiet man from the Basque country, who worked as a freelance journalist. The couple, both in their mid-30s, were on their way to adopt a baby girl. Porto swallowed two tablets of Orfidal &#8211; a common anti-anxiety medicine that she had used before then &#8211; but remained too agitated and excited to sleep....

Alfredo Balsa is well-known to police in and around Santiago de Compostela. An assiduous visitor of clubes de alterne &#8211; the legal, neon-lit bar-brothels that sit on the edges of every Spanish town &#8211; he had the habit of driving around drunk in his home parish of Teo, a sprawl of villages outside Santiago. By September 2013 he had been caught so often that his driving licence had been taken away, but the nearest club de alterne &#8211; the Satay &#8211; was only a mile away, down well-maintained dirt tracks, and the chances of being caught driving there were almost non-existent.

In the early hours of 22 September, he and a friend rolled out of a bar in the village of Feros, got into Balsa&#8217;s white Volkswagen Golf, and drove down the broad track to the back of the Satay. It was a remarkably bright night, but the oak and pine trees cast deep, black shadows, and it was among these that Balsa glimpsed something strange. It looked like a scarecrow. He stopped the car, reversed, pointed the headlights towards the spot and, sure enough, a human shape lay stretched out on a gently-sloping bank just two metres from the track. They got out of the car and stepped cautiously towards it. A girl lay on the bed of fallen pine needles, dressed in mud-stained grey sweatpants, with one arm half-inside a matching top and a white T-shirt pulled above her stomach. She was barefoot. The girl&#8217;s left arm was curled up to her shoulder, a large wet stain ran around her crotch, and there was a small amount of blood-tinged mucus under her nose. It was a shocking find, made stranger in this quiet country area because the girl was Asian. The men felt for a pulse, but there was none.

Thanks for sharing, that was a really good article. The investigators think the mother wanted a child because it was the done thing, pushed her into being perfect and high-achieving, then just decided to get rid of her when when she didn't want her any more - by murdering her interesting that most people who knew the couple thought they were wonderful parents.

I wonder why they had been drugging her for months? Did they hope it would kill her, or was she being argumentative as pre-teens can be and they hoped it would make her more passive, quiet and sedate?

That story about Asunta waking up to find a man standing over her bed was very strange, too... Did that actually happen? It seems to, because Asunta texted her friend that someone tried to kill her that day. could it have been her father with his face covered? Or perhaps her parents just told her they found someone in her room, and she believed them.

It's frustrating when murderers don't confess - you never get the whole, true story of what happened.